So, you go to the study. The people seem very nice and the professor who is leading the study (who is also the "Christian" on-campus group's faculty adviser) has brought some homemade carrot cake that his wife made. The experience is pleasant enough, and you go back the next week. After you've been at the study a couple of times people ask you what Church you belong to. You say that you are Catholic, and you can't help but notice a slight chill in the room, but it passes quickly and you continue going to the study.

Before long biblical passages are brought up at a study to "prove" that (fill in Catholic practice disliked by fundamentalists here) is ungodly. Catholicism is not explicitly referred to, but it makes you think, and it bothers you a bit. A few weeks after that one of your new friends asks you, with great concern in her voice, if you were ever molested by your priest when you were a boy. You are shocked -- Father Pierre was a good man and treated everyone is the Church like his own family. Your friend is glad to hear that you weren't molested, and expresses her sympathies for anyone that you might know who was. She gives you a hug and goes her way, and deep inside you wonder if something really is wrong with the Church you grew up in.

The weeks go by and you begin to learn to proof text. Some of the doctrines stated in the group sound much like what you were brought up with, sometimes others do not. Overall the experience continues to be pleasant enough, and is a social outlet for you, as you had hoped. You start thinking that you know quite a bit about the Bible, and you look forward to sharing your new knowledge with your family when you go home.

One week the subject of evolution comes up. You are surprised to find out that your friends do not accept that evolution occurs. When you protest (you remember your advanced biology classes in high school) you come under a whirlwind of attacks. The professor is particularly vitriolic, insisting that evolution is only a theory, and that if it were factual then it would not be considered a theory. The discussion is exhausting and you are quite emotionally distraught when someone makes what seems at the time an eminently reasonable suggestion. Why not teach both evolution and something called "Creationism" and let the students decide? The professor trots out what seems like scientific backing for "Creationism" and you find the idea attractive, its a compromise after all. You eagerly endorse it.

With the holidays approaching and finals in the wind, a friend from the group invites you to church with him. You normally attend church during the holiday season, so you go. The church is much different from what you are used to, and the speaker is a minister not a priest. He doesn't even wear a collar. The singing is energetic and the sermon is fiery and peppered with scripture passages that make it seem to surely be true, according to what you have learned in the group. At the end of the sermon the minister has an "altar call" and asks that those who are sinners come forward and repent, accepting Jesus into their hearts. You've been hearing about this sort of thing at the group -- and you have been feeling more guilty about things of late. You go forward -- and you are on your way to being at least an evangelical, perhaps a fundamentalist.

You my friend have been had. You have been misled from the first. At the beginning you misled yourself, out of a desire for a social outlet and new friends, but from there on out you were misled, sometimes quite skillfully, by others.

To start with, the tacit presupposition that the Bible is anything special is misleading. There is no evidence that the book is anything other than myth (see the pages in the section titled The Bible). It is probable that the students in the study generally do not know this, it is equally probable that the professor heading the study does, or at least knows that that the bible's fallibility is an accepted point of view. By making the Bible more than it is, not mentioning its detractors (many of them Christian theologians) and attaching significance beyond the historical weight that they carry to its words -- deliberately or undeliberately you have been misled to believe its edicts to be more than historical artifice -- on the strength of absolutely no real evidence.

The proof texting is meaningless. Roman Catholicism (along with Anglicanism and other old-line Christian faith traditions) believes that the Bible is not the sole source of truth and doctrine, but must be taken with other sources such as wisdom, tradition, knowledge, and compassion to make a whole. Evangelicals and fundamentalists discard those other sources and claim a special place as the sole moderator of truth for the Bible. While that may sound attractive, it makes them much less historical than the Old line Churches about their source of doctrine. Remember, Eucharistic (communion centered) Christianity was around for hundreds of years before the canon of books in the Bible was ever established. Old line Christians therefore might know something about doctrinal formation that fundamentalists have forgotten. In any event, comparing the two is futile. The faiths are different, not because the fundamentalists are right and Old style Christianity is wrong -- but because the fundamentalists are much newer. Pretend as you like that there were secret literalist cells back in the early days of the Church-- there weren't, all that belief is, is a game of make believe. Old line Christianity is the historic Christian faith, the faith that defeated other faiths such at the worship of Mithra and became the faith of the Roman Empire under Constantine. Fundamentalism is a new comer in the last 500 (five hundred) years -- and mostly in the last 150 (one hundred fifty) years or so. To condemn something in Roman Catholicism using the fundamentalist viewpoint is to condemn it from, not another form of Christianity, but more realistically from a different core faith. You might as well say that a Christian isn't a good Moslem -- it's equally true, and for exactly the same reason.

The discussion of evolution, while very germane to understanding fundamentalist thought, is also meaningless. Evolution has been accepted by Old line and mainstream Christians because it is clearly correct. Evolution is called a theory for the same reason that gravity is. Have you ever seen an object fall up if it was heavier than air? I doubt it. We observe evolution all the time. Evolution of organisms is why we now have flesh eating bacteria and SARS -- both evolved from other micro-organisms and jumped the species barrier to humans. To deny evolution is not just silly, it is ludicrous. Less ludicrous however than supporting Creationism, or (as it is now called) creation science. There is no science in Creationism as far as I can see, and I find the latter name for it odd. Creationism depends on discredited science, and as is pointed out by Professor Ian Plimer, fraud. (Plimer's book Telling lies for God- Reason versus Creationism, Random House, published in 1994 is an excellent resource for understanding exactly how ludicrous supporting Creationism is. Plimer has fought the Creationists in Australia for years, has had sittings at the Australian Supreme Court where he has successfully proven the case for fraud, and has exposed one of their leaders as a "degree-mill" Ph.D. While he won the "Eureka" award for his efforts, he also received thousands of hate letters, a number of death threats and two attempts by fundamentalists to remove him from his academic chairmanship.) The standard compromise offered by Creationists is to teach both evolution and Creationism together. The idea is a false compromise. Creationism is, like it or not, fundamentalist religion. Evolution is science. I know lots of mainstream and Old line Christians who have no problem accepting evolution, but even if they did -- the fact remains, Creationism is religion - and should be taught, perhaps, in comparative religion, not in science.

Lastly, the "conversion" that occurs is based on these preexisting conditions -- brought about by a series of quasi deceptions and misleading tactics -- together with the residual guilt from "your" upbringing and societal normatives, not by any act of God or the Holy Spirit. Social pressure helped make "you" go forward to the altar call, but most of the power behind it was that "you" were feeling badly about some things "you" had done -- and going forward to this big unseen being who would "forgive you" made "you" feel better about "yourself." Not a shock, we all need affirmation from others -- its the basis of most relationships. Additionally, guilt is a trained response. It is the interaction of the id and superego that causes it, and while it is not universal, it is certainly widespread. Some of it is unavoidable, some is not. When raising a child you have to tell him its bad to hurt people and bad to break things, and so forth. Later when he breaks something by accident he feels badly, and if he thinks he has hurt someone, or not shared something he feels guilty. God? Hardly, unless God is his mother. At the same time, societal pressures held by parents influences them to make the child feel badly about things that he shouldn't. So, for example, when "you" were in the penile stage of development - which all boys go through - and were constantly handling "your" penis, perhaps "your" mother told "you" it was dirty or evil. It obviosly is neither, but this convinced your subconscious - and years later when you started masturbating regularly, "you" felt badly about it, rather than just simply finding it a wonderful and relaxing experience and enjoying it. This continues for "you" (and many males) throughout life, making "you" feel badly every time you enjoy something sexual. That type of guilt is not only no more natural than the other, it isn't even necessary -- a small child will grow out of the penile stage and will have learned from society around him to keep his private activities fairly private, without parental intervention or guilt, if they can tolerate him acting out the developmental stage he is in to begin with (or so I read Freud). In any event, getting forgiveness from the "big unseen guy" allows "you" a catharsis and that cartharsis "sets" "your" psychology to embrace the experience it has just had and to continue on the path "you" have embarked on. Thus, half-truths, false trails and misdirection allows "you," (in combination with some very hopeful fundamentalist friends) to be misled into a religion that can dominate your life, and very likely make it less than it otherwise would have been.

Will "you" notice and so be able to escape back to life in the real universe? I hope so. Good luck.